"The Day After Tomorrow" Released in 2004 | American Criticism and Climate Change Prophecies Planted by German Director Emmerich

If we are to talk about the year 2004 through a single film, we must start with this one.
The Day After Tomorrow.
With a global box office of $544 million,
and three consecutive weeks at number one in Japan,
the figure of 5.2 billion yen in box office revenue indicates not just the hit of an entertainment film, but
that the image of "cities being destroyed" was
strongly shared around the world.
Three years after 9/11, the image of cities being destroyed was no longer
just an event within fiction.
In a world where the myth that New York City could never be destroyed had collapsed, this film destroys the city
in three stages.
At the time, many of the people watching this film in the darkness of the theater
must have simply enjoyed it as an intense disaster movie.
However, looking back on it now, we can see that the year 2004, when this film was released, was a time when the world had not yet fully recovered.
The audience's desire for the spectacle of destruction and the social atmosphere of genuinely fearing that cities could actually be destroyed
overlapped at exactly the same time.
In the beginning, a swarm of giant tornadoes hits Los Angeles, tearing apart the Hollywood cityscape.
It became a hot topic for its finish, where you couldn't feel the seams of the latest VFX compositing.
In the middle, an abnormally high storm surge swallows New York.
The scene where the Statue of Liberty is about to be swallowed by the waves
was used as a highlight in the trailer before the release,
and it was a production that directly confronted post-9/11 audiences with the fragility of cities.
And in the final act, the whole city is frozen in ice.
A rapid drop in water temperature is observed in Scotland, and the oil freezes, causing British military helicopters to crash.
The idea of depicting cold itself as a visual threat was a perspective not often seen in disaster films up to that point.
The giant, rock-like hail falling on Tokyo was also impressive. Meanwhile,
the Antarctic ice shelf collapsing at the beginning was based on the Larsen B ice shelf that actually collapsed two years before the release, and it imprinted on this film from the start the persuasiveness that it was not just a complete fantasy.
The protagonist is climatologist Jack Hall,
played by Dennis Quaid.
He appears as a diligent researcher who collects ice cores to reconstruct ancient climates, and in the film, he predicts the arrival of an ice age faster than anyone else.
Jake Gyllenhaal, who was still a young actor at the time, plays his son Sam, who is left behind in New York, and this film also skyrocketed his nationwide fame.
Sam goes on an adventure to find medicine at a stranded tanker ship to save his classmate Laura, whom he has feelings for,
and his companion Frank cuts the rope himself to save his friends and loses his life.
Behind the flashy spectacle, this script is characterized by carefully accumulating small dramas that force choices between life and death.
The scene where survivors left in the library burn books to keep warm is also deeply memorable.
Meanwhile, Jack's wife Lucy, who remained at the hospital, also carries the burden of a different evacuation drama, and barely succeeds in evacuating to Mexico. Father and son, and mother.
The structure where the three of them wander the boundary between life and death in different places, only to return to the same place at the end, supports the strength of this film as a family drama.
There was strong criticism regarding the scientific accuracy from the time of its release.
The development of entering an ice age in a few days
is an obvious exaggeration considering that real climate change is a phenomenon that progresses over decades to centuries, and on the review site Rotten Tomatoes, it had a 45% approval rating, and on Metacritic, it scored 47 out of 100,
so the evaluation was by no means high.
Even so, the reason this film struck a chord was likely because its emotional accuracy outweighed its scientific accuracy.
In 2005, AFP reported on a scientist's view that although not as rapid as in the film, there is a risk that the average temperature in Europe could drop by 4 degrees over the next decade,
and in later years, director Emmerich himself
said that this Gulf Stream slowdown theory
was confirmed by British scientists
and came to be called the "Day After Tomorrow effect."
There is a paradox here where an exaggerated work resulted in becoming an entry point for the real climate change debate.
Many of the people who watched this film in theaters at the time
must have taken it not as a scientific story, but as a simple fear that the weather could suddenly bare its fangs.
It could be said that this film ultimately proved that this simple fear remains in memory longer than precise predictive models.
What cannot be left out when talking about this film is
the position of the director, Roland Emmerich.
He is an immigrant director from Stuttgart, Germany,
who works in America.
He is the "King of Hollywood Destruction" who has repeatedly destroyed the White House in Independence Day and New York in Godzilla,
but he himself said in later years that he was politically left-leaning,
and he had always been concerned about that.
That is why he said things to the effect that he shot this film as a movie that heavily criticizes America. He also left statements saying he wants to think of himself as an outsider in Hollywood.
Even in his early works, which at first glance look like patriotic hymns to America, there is a theory among researchers that they were safe outlets for the conflicted patriotism held by a German director.
In other words, this director was a person who, while being inside America,
always maintained the eyes of someone outside of America.
While achieving success within the Hollywood system, he never abandoned the gaze of looking at that system itself from the outside.
The reason the work The Day After Tomorrow
leaves an aftertaste that cannot be contained within the format of a simple disaster movie is likely because this dual position permeates every part of the script.
A sub-theme that ran through it was criticism of the Bush administration.
The Vice President in the film, Raymond Becker,
does not take Jack's reports of the anomaly seriously despite his repeated warnings, and the President also stays in the White House until the limit, only to die when the helicopter he is evacuating in is caught in a super-freeze.
The development itself where Becker, who had escaped to Mexico a step ahead, is promoted to President
is a dig at the real-world politics of withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol.
The timing of its release in 2004, when the Iraq War was becoming a quagmire,
could be said to have been a message in itself.
Another symbolic element is the reversal of the staging where Americans evacuate to Mexico.
The flow of people, which usually goes from south to north,
is completely reversed in this film.
In the final part of the story, Becker, who has become President, gives a speech at the evacuation site expressing gratitude to the developing countries that accepted his citizens and stating that developed countries should take the lead in addressing environmental issues.
The development itself, where America is on the side of being helped after the illusion that it protects the world has collapsed, is the political core of this film.
Here, too, the ironic gaze toward American-centrism, which only a German director could have, is visible.
Emmerich repeated a similar structure of destruction in his later film 2012, and it can be inferred that the political devices shown in this film were not a one-time thing, but a stance that runs through his entire filmography.
The way it was received in Japan was also interesting.
I remember that there were more comments about it being poignant than about it being scary.
The ending, where father and son finally reunite in the city of ice, is structured to land the global-scale loss on the smallest unit of family.
The conclusion that all that remains after civilization is destroyed is knowledge and family was quietly
placed deep behind the flashy special effects.
The ending of the Japanese dubbed version featured a song by the group "day after tomorrow" from avex trax,
and including the fact that Natsuko Toda handled the subtitles, it must be a familiar memory for the demographic that was following blockbusters of this scale at the time.
In the darkness of the theater, while watching the images of cities freezing over, you suddenly want to confirm the presence of the family member next to you.
There must have been quite a few audience members who left the theater with that feeling at the time.
Even though it is a story about the world ending, the paradox that remains after watching it is the closeness to someone next to you, which this film possesses.
Back then, this film was seen in some ways as a slightly exaggerated doomsday movie.
However, more than 20 years later, abnormal weather and
climate change have become real news.
The future that was depicted on the other side of the screen in 2004
has, before we knew it, been gradually approaching our daily lives.
In 2004 in Japan, works depicting the death of a lover or the loss of memory
were also a year where they became a national shared experience.
Global-scale loss and individual-scale loss.
Even though the scales are completely different,
the waveforms of emotion look somewhat overlapping.
2004 was,
rather than the world ending,
the year we began to accept the world breaking as a reality.
Even if you can't save the world,
you can protect someone next to you.
What this film left behind in the end was,
not the ice age, but
human warmth.
That is why,
as a film that reflects the era of 2004,
it still does not fade today.

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